Sunday, January 10, 2016

1990s Should Be Remembered as Russia’s Second NEP, Vishnevsky Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, January 10 – Many look
back at the 1990s as a horrific time, but in fact, demographer Anatoly
Vishnevsky says, there were a great many positive developments at “a time of
great hopes” just like the period of the New Economic Policy between the end of
the Russian Civil War and the beginning of Stalinist collectivization.

In that earlier period, the director
of the Institute of Demography at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, says,
“everything was overthrown and the word ‘nepman’ became a term of abuse,” even
though the NEP like the 1990s was “a path which wasn’t realized then but which
perhaps could have been extremely successful” (polit.ru/article/2016/01/08/gloss_vishnevsky/).

Many of the negative things Russians
have come to believe about the 1990s simply aren’t true or better aren’t true
for the entire period, Vishnevsky says; and many of the positive developments
of that decade are ignored altogether, with people choosing to remember only
what they think went wrong rather than what in fact went right.

The demographic situation is a case
in point, he continues. “Mortality sharply rose in the early 1990s and reached
a peak in 1994, but already from that year began the rapid restoration of the
former level, which unfortunately broke off in 1998 as a result of the default
and economic crisis.”

“No less important,” he observes, “are
those changes which took place with regard to birthrates and which also are
understood by few even now.” In the early 1990s, there was a shock and
birthrates plummeted, but when times started to improve, Russians began to have
more children, often when they were older than had been true earlier.

That aging of new parents had
happened across Europe in the mid-1970s, but it did not happen in Russia until
the mid-1990s. And that lag led some to overstate the changes in Russia in ways
that ignored the more general pattern.In all advanced economies, people are choosing to delay having children
beyond what had been typical.

Indicative of an even more
fundamental change, Vishnevsky says, is what happened with regard to abortions.
In the 1960s, there were 300 abortions for every 100 births. That figure had
fallen to approximately 200 for every 100 by the end of the 1980s. In the
1990s, the numbers of abortions fell radically and now there are only 50
abortions for every 100 births.

The demographer says that in his
view, “this happened because contraceptives became available. The state did not
play any role, but people themselves obtained the chance to make decisions” on
their own.And “the reduction of the
number of abortions is one of the very most important achievements of the
1990s.”

Another major development in the
1990s that was far more positive than many now think, the demographer stresses,
was migration. Much of it consisted of ethnic Russians returning to their
homeland and thus boosting the Russian component of the Russian Federation. It
did not place the burdens on other Russians that many now appear to believe.